Wake up Dreamers

If you are in the darkness sit and be still and you will see the light. I mean this literally. We are complex and incomprehensible mystical beings. We are deep, and deeper than we know, all of us. Everything about us from our psyche to our history to whatever other name we’ve placed on the intricacies of our being, places us in whatever incomprehensible, ever moving, state we find ourselves now. In so, know that wherever you are, personally, may not transfer with such immediacy we desire to where we will be, or want to be, or must be. So be still, breathe, and take heart. I do not believe we need to or even can understand it, but we must move in it. We must move for movement is life. So, don’t take this as an act against acting. We suffer mostly from our inability to move, and so live. We suffer in dreams, when dreams never touch the living. Movement is life and we must move with a fullness, or rather we must move with a wholeness. However there is a movement also in our stillness and in fact if we can not be still where we are at, we often will not be able to move so wholly. I met a kid named Jimmy the night before the first raid at occupy, in Oakland. He had written the word Intimacy largely with a marker on a piece of poster board and thrown an I-Ching lot over it and written the results below. So underneath it had the result which was the hexagram for decay, as well as the word written boldly above it. It bothered me. Probably because I could feel the decay happening in an ever growing camp of people coming from everywhere having to bond together and deal with police, the city, media, if not to mention each other. Weeks into it everything was still going strong in one sense, but there was certainly a sense of decay, as strong of a word as that is. But there was Jimmy, with his wild eyes, just walking around holding his homemade poster above his head speaking to whoever came to speak to him. I came up with an air of weary trouble, I’m sure. It didn’t help that I barely slept for those first few weeks and worked more than full days mostly spent in the kitchen and I was probably a bit more out of my mind than usual at that moment. Jimmy asked me what I saw in the reading and in the word Intimacy. I muttered a few things I was thinking, and then he began to speak about it. As he began to explain to me what he saw it hit me strangely because in a way it seemed like he could only see good in it and was even in a celebratory determiner the whole time. Honestly, a lot of times, very often, I can’t understand anything he’s talking about. I had more times with him and in fact in our second wave of encampment we became organizers together for several things, including setting up the prayer tent that sat in the middle of camp. Of what he said that night, and many other times, I could only translate little bits for myself through what I suppose people call a very esoteric understanding of things, but I appreciate him for it. What he really reminded me of was the deep spiritual truth, as all truth is spiritual, that we must find peace where we are. So today, be still with God and if it doesn’t solve all your problems, it’s OK. I don’t feel some great sense of earth shattering peace, I don’t even know what I’m going to do today. Honestly a lot of things in my life have been very strange lately, and I’ve felt off and detached and unsure of what I’m doing, but this is something I wrote for you so you would know this is where I am at and I am not afraid and neither do you have to be. Today when I finally do get still I can hear that peace whispering somewhere, and when we do find ourselves fully pulled from our sleep, even now as we slowly begin to stir, I am excited for that time as well. So know also that despite whatever struggles and weariness and heartache and heartbreak at least I have undergone these last few years, I still believe in so many incredible things. Sometimes I feel like my heart is breaking in half, but I still have so much hope.

Also, don’t get me wrong, I have certainly had necessary moments of enlightenment howling at the moon or crouching naked on a hotel end table staring at crappy TV slamming energy drinks and eating a jar of peanut butter with my bare hands, but let’s just say there are times for many things.